Four new reports from WAN-IFRA

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Four new reports from WAN-IFRA

A digital surge just occurred: WAN-IFRA just published four reports that deal with an array of digital media-oriented topics and strategies, highlighting global best-practice, smart use of data, growth strategies, and ads in VR.

WAN-IFRA members can download all of these reports for free by just clicking on the links (headlines of each report below). Non-members can buy the reports at the same links.

Every year media companies from all over the world vie for WAN-IFRA's digital media awards competition. The winners of all the regional competitions qualify to compete in the World Digital Media Awards.

This year's winners come from five continents. With plenty of regional market differences and having participated in a competition featuring 10 categories across the digital spectrum of publishing, what do they have in common?

In one way or another, many of these projects, whether new or developments of existing ones, seem to start with a blank canvas: "Why do what we did the last time or last year?"

They also show publishers' increasing willingness to embrace collaboration across departments such as editorial, commercial, tech, and marketing.

Development is increasingly taking place in-house, while at the same time embracing new tools and external partners for assistance.

And while planning is indeed a major part of their success, testing, testing, iterating – or "We are making this up as we go along" – is a mantra.

After helping and learning from hundreds of the best media companies in the world, our WAN-IFRA Global Advisory team has collected a considerable number of insights into the state of the art in digital media.

Together with our team of consultants, industry experts and leading publishers, we have identified six key pillars that publishers have to get right to ensure a successful digital media operation. We used each of these areas as a pillar on which to build our new online learning platform, the Media Management Accelerator, and we have expanded further on them here in this report.These six pillars are:

In early 2017, WAN-IFRA received funding from the Google DNI fund to create a prototype ad unit in 360 video. Working with Mediahuis in Belgium as a publisher partner, we documented the entire process and created this report to address some of the challenges and provide information for others trying to build a revenue stream for future VR, 360 video and even AR projects.

Nick Tjaardstra, Director of Global Advisory for WAN-IFRA, headed up the project and wrote the report. Here are some his takeaways.

Realistic 3D elements including ads can be very easily layered on 360 video by internal staff with approximately one week of training.

Boiled down to one word, the message of this report is "listen!" Use your ears – and your heart. To paraphrase Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "It is only with the heart that one can hear rightly; what is essential is inaudible to the ear." Who should you listen to? Your customers and the people employed in all levels at your company.

That might seem like an odd message for the last report in a series about data. Aren't we getting into "touchy-feely" territory here? Can you really achieve quantifiable results – boost your company's bottom line – by harvesting information about people's emotions? Yes, you can.

Xavier van Leeuwe and Matthijs van de Peppel of NRC Media in the Netherlands learned a lot about listening in the last few years. They put their lessons to work to improve NRC's bottom line, and they share those lessons in this report.

As mentioned in the first two reports in this series, NRC's leap into data and analytics was assisted by Mather Economics of the USA. Together with Matt Lindsay of Mather, Van Leeuwe and van de Peppel have written a book about their experiences and generously allowed us to publish excerpts in this series of three reports.

While the first two reports – "How to make data work for your news organization" and "Building valuable relationships" – focus on "listening" to customers and staff members by means of bits and bytes, this one will inspire you to sit down with those people to find out how they really feel about your products and services. Yes, it is time-consuming, but necessary. In fact, it is unavoidable if you are serious about sustaining and improving relationships – the core of your business – by improving customer experience.

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The World Editors Forum is the organisation within the World Association of Newspapers devoted to newspaper editors worldwide. The Editors Weblog (www.editorsweblog.org), launched in January 2004, is a WEF initiative designed to facilitate the diffusion of information relevant to newspapers and their editors.